Learning to bend: Settling Utah's road warshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.16/learning-to-bend-settling-utahs-road-wars
A book review of Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country by Jedediah S. RogersRoads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon CountryJedediah S. Rogers242 pages, hardcover: $39.95.University of Utah Press, 2013.

Some fear that we will saddle our children with trillions of dollars in federal debt. That would be too bad, but it would be a minor inconvenience compared to what our forefathers cursed us with: the 1866 federal law known as R.S. 2477. Like other such gifts -- including the 1872 Mining Law -- R.S. 2477 lays a heavy, destructive, expensive hand on the present.

The statute's 19 words said that anyone who wished to could build a public "highway" across the West's public land. That highway could not be extinguished by the later creation of a homestead, a national park or even a wilderness.

R.S. 2477 was repealed in 1976, but its highways -- sometimes nothing more than rough trails made by cowboys herding cattle -- are still being fought over in the West. That is especially true in Utah, where the state has launched 30 federal lawsuits to establish 36,000 miles of mechanized rights of way through existing wilderness, national parks and monuments, and wilderness study areas.

Into this expensive, litigious mess bravely comes the young historian Jedediah S. Rogers. With Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country, Rogers attempts to connect two warring ways of life. He asks us to look at roads not only as physical structures but as symbols of culture and history. In Rogers' telling, the Mormons of southern Utah regard the primitive roads their ancestors pioneered as comparable to the naves of medieval cathedrals. To interfere with the public's ability to travel them amounts to sacrilege. But to those who favor wilderness, the sacrilege is motorized travel through red-rock canyons and riparian areas.

Rogers humanizes the conflict over wilderness by portraying some of the people most involved. He is sympathetic both toward Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, and toward Abbey's nemesis, uranium miner and Lake Powell resort developer Calvin Black, immortalized by Abbey as the character "Bishop Love."

Abbey hated roads -- the better the road, the more he hated it -- and the reservoir he called Lake Foul. Black appreciated Lake Powell because it also served as a highway, and so loved roads, writes Rogers, that he assumed the 1960s slogan "Black is Beautiful" referred to pavement.

Given the area's bitter history -- which includes the Grand County commissioners repeatedly, and feloniously, sending bulldozers into Moab's Negro Bill Canyon to "refresh" the disappearing road -- what could bring the two sides to the table now?

Partly it is the passing of generations; both Black and Abbey are gone, for example. And partly it is exhaustion from decades of expensive struggle.

But it may also be fear of the future: Utah could win its R.S. 2477 cases, or President Barack Obama might unleash the 1906 Antiquities Act, as President Clinton did at Grand Staircase-Escalante, and create de facto wilderness. Or both events might happen, further complicating what is already a mess.

Rogers' book is both perfectly timed and a sign of the times, appearing as Utah Congressman Rob Bishop seems to be progressing toward a two-state solution in Utah, with some public land being protected and some now-protected land being opened to development.

Although the book is well-timed, it isn't always well-written, and it lacks clear maps to illustrate chapters about the road wars in places like Arch Canyon and the Book Cliffs.

While Rogers lacks the partisan passion of an Abbey or Black, he has passions appropriate to this time: for compromise and the merging of interests. He believes that if the two sides were to bend a little, each would win more than they could by defeating the other in Congress or the White House or the courts.

He urges environmentalists to see desert homesteads, mine shafts, abandoned orchards and even roads as part of a landscape shaped by humans but still dominated by nature. He quotes environmental historian Bill Cronon, who has written that the exclusion of man's works from nature is dehumanizing.

And he asks southern Utah's Mormon residents to acknowledge that the heroic pioneer days, when wagon trains were lowered to the Colorado River by rope down the Hole in the Rock notch, are over. We have blasted an interstate highway through the San Rafael Swell and turned parts of the Colorado, San Juan and Escalante rivers into ponds. Progress now, Rogers argues, is not demonstrated by how much more nature we can bulldoze, but by how much we can refrain from conquering:

"In a country -- a world -- that is increasingly developed one acre at a time, we need these places to keep us rooted. The (Colorado Plateau) region is one of the few places where large tracts of wildlands exist."

]]>No publisherPoliticsUtahBooks2013/09/16 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA final hats off to rancher Doc Hatfieldhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/a-final-hats-off-to-rancher-doc-hatfield
With the help of his wife, Connie, and a bunch of determined fellow ranchers, the late Doc Hatfield helped change the face of public-lands ranching in the West.Doc Hatfield died March 20 at his home in Sisters, Ore., just after his 74th birthday, soon after his and his wife Connie's 49th anniversary, and an extraordinarily long three years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which usually kills within a year of diagnosis. Many Westerners may not have heard of them, but the couple changed the face of public-land ranching in the West.

In their business-as-usual way, the couple held a kind of "memorial service" for Doc last August, while he was still there to appreciate it. And naturally, the day was tied to public-land ranching and cattle. The outfit they had founded -- Country Natural Beef -- was celebrating its 25th anniversary, and 350 or so of their friends and associates gathered to give Doc a final sendoff. There were ranchers there, of course; Country Natural Beef has grown from the original struggling 14 ranch families to 120 families spread across 14 states. But the gathering also included the people who run the slaughterhouses, the retailers, the bean counters, and so on.

The 350 people came not only to say goodbye to an extraordinary man, but also to mark a shift in how ranching is done on the nation's hundreds of millions of acres of public land.

The Hatfields helped found Country Natural Beef because they hated the fact that cattle often beat up the land. They disliked the conflict between ranchers, bureaucrats and environmentalists. And as businesspeople, they resented the negative way urban people looked at public-land ranching.

So the Hatfields tried something radical. They started talking to people outside of the ranching world. The conversation began in Sisters, Ore., with 30 or so ranchers and environmentalists and federal agency people sitting in a circle and talking about ways to bring back grasses, heal gullies, convince springs to flow again, and manage cattle to coexist with wildlife. Doc and Connie were the glue that h held the group together and the grease that helped even quarrelsome individuals slide past each other.

The story of the marketing co-op's birth today has the status of a creation myth. Doc and Connie had been going broke, selling breeding bulls to neighboring ranchers who were also going broke. Connie dreamed of someday earning enough money to pay income tax. Out of desperation, 14 local ranchers formed a marketing co-op to sell their cattle directly to stores. The ranchers chose Connie to do the selling.

Doc recalls: "They sent Connie out ... because we men knew it wouldn't work." Supermarkets didn't like to deal directly with ranchers. But "She sold them. She went into the stores and said: 'We have 10,000 mother cows. How can we serve you?' "

Doc was also a born marketer. When Portland stores handling the co-op's public land beef were picketed by Earth First! and the Oregon Natural Resource Council, the couple drove to Portland to speak to them. "It is the rancher's job to find out what the consumer wants - even if the consumer is carrying a picket sign - and then deliver it," Doc said.

Today, "natural beef" is common; back then, cattle raised without hormones and pharmaceuticals and largely on grass were unique. The Hatfields marketed both the sizzle -- the high-desert grazing lands -- and the steak - the low- fat, nutritious, marbled-just-enough meat.

The co-op was hard work. Twice a year, all the ranchers, both husbands and wives, had to come together, sit in a circle, and make decisions by consensus. Several times a year, the families spent a weekend in the meat department of a store like Whole Foods, telling people with facial jewelry, pink hair and outrageous political views about the virtues of their cattle and public-land ranching.

Doc understood that the best way to build support for public-land ranching was to sell a person a tasty and nutritious product of that land. He also knew that the quickest way to get his fellow ranchers to open their minds was to guide some urban money into their pockets.

But money was never the point for Doc or Connie or for most of their ranchers. The point always was the land, and their lives on it.

Early on, Doc discovered that his cattle were trampling on duck eggs, so his ponds had only adult ducks. He learned that from a group of environmentalists he had invited to the ranch to demonstrate what great stewards he and Connie were. At first, Doc was defensive. "That's a pond for adult ducks," he joked. But then he learned how to keep his cattle away from the ponds during nesting. Quickly, he said, in telling another of his creation stories, their High Desert Ranch had baby ducks, mature ducks and old ducks.

That pond full of generations of ducks became a perfect metaphor to describe his dream: That every Western ranch should endure, populated by ranchers of all generations.

Ed Marston is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado. He published the newspaper from 1983-2002.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2012/04/27 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe genesis of the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.1/the-genesis-of-the-west
Douglas Brinkley's magisterial The Wilderness Warrior describes how Teddy Roosevelt created the American West we love today.The Bible tells us that God created the Earth in six days.

Now comes historian Douglas Brinkley with his massive The Wilderness Warrior to tell us that President Theodore Roosevelt created the American West in seven years.

From Sept. 14, 1901, to March 3, 1909, Roosevelt forged a glorious legacy for those who revel in the beauty and wildlife of the West.

Where possible, he worked with Congress. Together, for example, they created Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. But if Congress resisted, TR would roll over it, as he did in 1906, when he invoked the newborn Antiquities Act to protect the Grand Canyon — one of 18 times he used the law to set aside national monuments. Overall, he issued executive orders creating 51 bird refuges, four game preserves, and 150 national forests.

Idaho, for example, should rightly call itself Rooseveltia to honor the man who created a dozen national forests and two wildlife refuges in the state. But other states have an equal claim to the name: TR created three national parks or monuments in New Mexico, five in Arizona, four in California, and two in Colorado.

The strength of Brinkley's biography lies in its description of our youngest-ever president's environmentalism. Only Jimmy Carter's 80-million-acre Alaska Lands Act of 1980 comes close to TR's protection of 230 million acres, most of them in the West. And only Richard Nixon's signing of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act Extension and the Endangered Species Act took us in a new environmental direction the way Roosevelt did.

But the actions taken by Carter, Nixon and then Clinton, with his 20-plus national monuments, were peripheral to their presidencies. Brinkley argues convincingly that TR's environmental achievements were at the core of his life, his presidency, and his strategy for creating a great and powerful nation.

TR's protected lands were a declaration that the United States could afford to set aside vast landscapes as symbols of its greatness. But Roosevelt also believed that the protected lands were useful. He believed that the nation's ability to develop industrially and to fight wars rested on men who were brought up leading "strenuous lives." To do that, they needed wilderness and wildlife to test themselves against.

TR lived the strenuous life he preached. As a hunter, he slaughtered thousands of large animals. As an explorer, he almost lost his life on the South American River of Doubt after his presidency. But he was also a scholar and writer, responsible for 35 books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters. His books are mostly forgotten, but he remains famous for signing hundreds of proclamations protecting land and wildlife.

TR knew that laws and proclamations alone wouldn't protect land and wildlife. So he recruited powerful protectors: straight-shooting frontiersmen from the Rough Riders who had accompanied him to Cuba and from the African-American Buffalo Soldiers who had fought the Plains Indians.

TR's conservation achievements were enough to earn him a perch on Mount Rushmore. But Brinkley reminds us that Roosevelt was as enthusiastic about developing natural resources as he was about setting some of them aside. Even as he was protecting Florida's birds, he was trying to drain the Everglades to further its development.

In the West, he backed and then implemented the Newlands Act, a 1902 law that led to the draining and damming of thousands of streams and rivers to irrigate millions of acres across 17 Western states.Economically, his "trust busting" was mostly a matter of imposing restraint on those who called him "a traitor to his class." He had no desire to damage the industrialists and financiers he thought the nation's greatness also rested on. He said, and meant, "Conservation means development as much as it does protection."

Abroad, he was the great colonizer, achieving pre-presidential fame in Cuba at the head of his Rough Riders. In Central America, he carved Panama out of Colombia to build the Panama Canal. Finally, as peacemaker, he received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to end the war between Japan and Russia.

In our liberal, environmentalist dreams, we might prefer a Roosevelt who was not an imperialist, who did not have a blood lust for big game, and who was not a social Darwinist.

But that would deprive us of the TR that Brinkley so vividly brings to life. That TR — with his squeaky voice, his puny childhood, his weak and bespectacled eyes, his draft-dodger father — transformed himself into a vigorous, indomitable, war-like man who learned to command the loyalty and obedience of a young and vigorous and brutal nation.

Luckily for that nation, and now for us, he was also a first-rate scientist, an intellectual, a voracious reader and author, and a man of such compassion and justice that he almost always overcame his race and class, although never his nationality, to do the right thing.

The American West could not have had a better founder.

The author is HCN's former publisher.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBooks2010/01/15 05:00:00 GMT-7ArticlePrimer 4: Waterhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/17560
Former HCN publisher concludes that those who live in the
West must accept its unpredictability.If you want a glimpse of the unpredictable nature of
water in the arid West, pick up a Utah newspaper from late fall or
winter of 1983. Almost every story was about flooding. Floods that
menaced Interstate 80 and the Southern Pacific Railroad with the
waters of the Great Salt Lake. Floods that threatened to drown the
runways at the Salt Lake City Airport. Floods that coursed down the
city’s main street and inundated the Great Salt Lake wetlands
that wildlife depend on.

By 1983, the Bureau of
Reclamation had stopped building dams in the West, so Mother Nature
made one of her own: An immense landslide that dammed Utah’s
Spanish Fork River with a 200-foot high, 1,000-foot-long wall of
dirt. The backed-up water covered Thistle, Utah, and cut eastern
Utah off from the populous Front Range. Mines in the Price area
could no longer ship coal west.

Downstream of Utah,
Arizonans and Californians who had built their homes or farmed
fields near the Colorado River were flooded. Six people were
killed; property damage was immense. Some blamed the homeowners and
farmers. But why shouldn’t they have built and farmed close
to the Colorado? After all, they were protected by 24 major dams
upstream whose function was, in part, flood control.

Of
course, those dams were almost full going into the flood season.
Westerners fear shortages, not flooding. Westerners would do
anything rather than waste water.

In particular, Glen
Canyon Dam was near its 25 million-acre-foot capacity when spring
1983 runoff began. That greed for water almost killed the
600-foot-high structure. Snowmelt and rain roaring off the Rockies
into Lake Powell had to be sent through the dam’s spillway
tunnels for week after week. And week after week, that water ate
into the soft sandstone. It came close to creating what engineers
call an “uncontrolled connection” between Lake Powell
and the Grand Canyon. Had that happened, Glen Canyon would have
been gutted and 25 million acre-feet of water would have smashed
into Hoover Dam, ripping it apart. We would today be living in a
very different world.

But we live in a very different
world anyway. Lake Powell and Lake Mead have more water in them
than if they had been breached, but they’re still half empty.
We have spent recent years thinking drought, higher temperatures,
and more evaporation. Habitat that was being drowned in the early
1980s is being baked today.

Back in the mid-1980s, Utah
invested in two huge diesel pumps to keep down the Great Salt
Lake’s water level. They were never turned on. What should we
have learned from this?

There is only one take-away:
Humility.

Those who choose to live in the West must
accept its unpredictability. We cannot control this ever
on-the-edge, unstable land, or its weather, or its climate. We can
only try to live with what they deliver.

Below,
we’ve listed some of the many stories about water from the
archives of High Country News.

The author is the
former publisher of High Country News.
]]>No publisherWaterWriters on the Range2008/04/16 16:50:00 GMT-6ArticleA corps of visitors, not discoverershttp://www.hcn.org/issues/337/16767
In Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes,
the late historian Alvin Josephy Jr. has assembled essays by nine
Indian writers who examine the Corps of Discovery from the other
side of the cultural looking glassIn Lewis and Clark Through Indian
Eyes, the late historian and journalist Alvin Josephy
assembles nine weakly linked essays by 10 Indian writers. A few
essays are solid; some are tough to get through. But together they
should enable the Anglo reader to pass through the looking glass,
as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s classic, and see the
West’s history from a very different perspective.

As we know, the victors in any war write the history, and we have
had 200 years of such writing. From the victor’s side of the
looking glass, Lewis and Clark guided their soldiers through a
trackless wilderness filled with ferocious grizzly bears and
hostile Indians. They were sent West in 1804 by the nation’s
visionary president, Thomas Jefferson, who had just spent $15
million to buy the 827,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory. Lewis
and Clark’s job was to see what Jefferson had bought and to
nail down the United States’ possession of that land.

As with all creation myths, the story turns out
beautifully. Lewis and Clark push their way past an aggressive
Sioux band, survive a harsh winter with the Mandans, find their way
through the mountains to the Pacific, and return home 19 months
later, having lost but a single man, most likely to appendicitis.

The losers’ narrative differs, not in the facts but
in the interpretation. To appreciate this, it helps to read the
Indian writers’ essays with a traditional history at your
side, such as Bernard DeVoto’s Course of
Empire or Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted
Courage.

From the DeVoto-Ambrose side of the
mirror, the voyage was one long and heroic act, one close call, one
brilliant decision after another.

But here’s how
the late Indian historian Vine DeLoria Jr. describes the same
events in the opening essay of Lewis and Clark Through
Indian Eyes: "The expedition actually seems to have been
a tedious march from one place to another (with the route) made
known to them by Indians and French traders …"

According to DeLoria, the voyagers were the latest in a long string
of white visitors. The expedition encountered a population of
"half-breeds of French-Indian heritage, some people representing
second and even third generations out on the plains …"

From the Indian perspective, Lewis and Clark made a
fairly routine march through a land occupied by hundreds of
sovereign Indian nations. Those nations interacted with each other
through trade, war and treaty, much as European nations did
thousand of miles to the east. The Corps of Discovery, in the
Indians’ view, was actually a Corps of Visitors to a settled
landscape. Finally, the Corps wasn’t mapping land the United
States owned. According to essayist Roberta Conner, director of the
Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, Jefferson had bought only what
might be called hunting rights from the French, which allowed the
U.S. to attempt to colonize the Louisiana Territory by convincing
the Indian nations, through force or purchase or salesmanship, to
give over their lands.

But the Indian essays are rarely
recriminatory or bitter. The writings are family remembrances,
discussions of how unimportant the expedition was to the Indians at
that time, and attempts to imagine what their ancestors could have
done to avoid the disasters that came in the wake of the explorers.

Even though the expedition took place two centuries ago,
many of the essayists write as if it were almost a contemporary
event. Moreover, despite the immensity of the changes the
expedition presaged, some of the authors see the last 200 years as
just a blip in their collective lives. With the possible exception
of former Montana state Sen. Bill Yellowtail’s essay on
individuality versus tribal identity, their struggle is to hang on
to who they are, recover what land they can, and wait for these bad
times to pass.

The story of Lewis and Clark is now over
two centuries old. And yet in its drive to expand and commercialize
the United States, in the greed of the expedition’s leader,
and in the hypocrisy of the nation’s leader, it is a very
modern tale.

The author is the former publisher
of High Country News.

Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes

Edited by Alvin M. Josephy Jr. with Marc Jaffe

196 pages,
hardcover: $24.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBooksArticleHCN says farewell to an old friendhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/322/16297
Herman Warsh, a beloved former HCN
board member and longtime supporter of the paper, is deadHigh Country News has always been
fortunate in the people it attracts, whether they are readers,
writers, staff or board members. Never has it been more fortunate
than the day in 1984 when Herman Warsh agreed to
join our board.

Herman knew he was signing on for a tough
voyage. Circulation was about 3,500, the subscriber renewal rate
was a low 55 percent, and the paper’s bottom line lurched
from red to black and then back to red, with total income never
getting above a starvation level of $120,000 per year. Morale was
even worse. Day to day, we were distracted: There was always
another story to write and another paper to get out.

Still, every four months, staff and board met in some Western town
to take HCN’s various pulses. This is
where Herman shone. While some of us were interpreting setbacks as
catastrophes, he was steadying us and helping us to see
possibilities. With a few words, he could turn a heated argument
into a civilized debate.

We saw Herman’s character
most clearly when staff visited him and his wife, Maryanne Mott, at
their ranch near Emigrant, Mont. It happened to be near the ranch
owned by the Church Universal and Triumphant, which most people in
Montana saw as a dangerous cult. But when Herman took us over to
visit the ranch and tour its facilities, we got a warm welcome.
That was because to Herman, the members of the church were just
neighbors, and he judged them as such. If they kept up their
fences, took care of the land, and were polite, that was enough for
him. In turn, they treated him the same way.

Herman was
the opposite of a fair-weather friend. When High Country
News finally did hit fair weather, he figured it was time
for him to move on; he stepped down from the board in 1992. Not
coincidentally, the "Dear Friends" column announcing his departure
also announced that the paper had added an extraordinary 5,000 new
subscribers in 1991, to reach 11,000. Its 1991 renewal rate had
climbed to 70 percent. Finally, the paper had generated a surplus
(by definition, nonprofits do not make profits) of $50,000 on
revenues of $500,000.

Even after leaving the board,
Herman and Maryanne remained staunch financial supporters of
HCN, especially its intern program.

Herman died on April 18. The staff and board of
HCN send their condolences to Maryanne, family
and friends.

]]>No publisherDear FriendsArticleIt's the West's turn to call the shotshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/290/15241
The neglected, underestimated Interior West might plant
the seeds of change for the current American empire The American
West, said the invitation, "lacks an intellectual, cultural or
social presence within either the country or the continent. Eastern
publishers, Eastern intellectual centers and agencies, public and
private, based in Washington, D.C., still provide the authoritative
voices on Western matters."

In other words, if the
American West were slightly more advanced, it might qualify as a
backwater.

If this is true of the part of the West that
includes Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, imagine how true
it is of the Interior West of Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, Montana,
Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.

These big-box states are,
in many ways, worse off than other out-of-it places like Oklahoma,
Arkansas and West Virginia: Half of the Western states are federal
land administered by agencies based in the East.

It is
usually said that the Interior West is a colony of the federal
government. Unfortunately, our former colonial master has lost
interest in the West, and is now chasing new colonies in Iraq, the
"Stans" and the Ukraine. That we are a cast-off colony — a
first-wives’ region — means the feds no longer
subsidize our dams, or the logging of our matchstick-sized trees,
or the building of nuclear weapons here.

Therefore, we
should be in an economic depression. Instead, even after five years
of drought, this once-rural region is booming. I think that’s
because we have glorious national parks such as Yellowstone, the
Grand Canyon and Glacier. Visitors get a taste for these landscapes
and then find that they can own their own little national park, or
at least a national monument. So it is our fate that millions of
Americans are moving here, bringing equity and pensions to this
aspiring backwater.

As a result, the pretty West is
making do. But will this transfer of wealth halt when the last
"unspoiled" valley is spoiled?

Of course, lots of places
don’t even have this much of a future. But sometimes,
no-account regions rise up. According to Joseph Ellis’s
His Excellency, a biography of George
Washington, the American Revolution really started when Washington
realized he was keeping himself in poverty by aping the British
nobility’s pricey way of life.

Washington urged his
countrymen to produce their own goods to free themselves from
English imports. In the end, of course, the scorned, culture-less
colonies triumphed and came to dominate the English-speaking world.
They succeeded because the colonists had — in addition to
several million square miles of land at their backs —
aggression, pride and a genius for politics.

Might the
land-rich and culture-poor Interior West also be the seed of change
that ripens within the current American empire?

There are
signs.This spring, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson organized an
international meeting on energy for Western Canada, Western Mexico
and the Western United States. Richardson wants to weld together
the Western portion of North America using our common stores of
energy — both the fossil kind and the renewable kind.

I don’t know if the governor was asked by John
Kerry to be his running mate. But if Richardson was asked and
turned Kerry down, it might be because he thinks putting together
the Western chunks of three nations is more important than becoming
vice president of a declining imperial government.

This
is not about revolution, of course. It is about the filling of a
vacuum created by the federal government’s decision to ignore
a large chunk of the nation in order to go off on foreign
adventures. Patriotism will carry those adventures for a while. Yet
in the end, the United States is a very practical, bottom-line
nation.

The correction to this adventuring should have
come from the "blue states," but despite the presence in their
midst of Harvard, The New York Times and herds
of intellectuals, they have proven more tone-deaf to America than
the present administration.

So it is up to the West,
whether led by Richardson, California Republican Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger or Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, to figure out
what’s more important to America — nation-building far
from home, or building energy independence.

Ed
Marston, former publisher of High Country News,
lives and writes in Paonia, Colorado.

]]>No publisherPoliticsEssaysArticleIt’s the West’s turn to call the shotshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/15211
The writer sees political leadership emerging from the
West, a region disdained by the Eastern establishment.I was recently invited to a
seminar at a university whose thesis might be considered insulting.

The American West, said the invitation, "lacks an
intellectual, cultural or social presence within either the country
or the continent. Eastern publishers, Eastern intellectual centers
and agencies, public and private, based in Washington, D.C., still
provide the authoritative voices on Western matters."

In
other words, if the American West were slightly more advanced, it
might qualify as a backwater.

If this is true of the part
of the West that includes Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle,
imagine how true it is of the interior West of Wyoming, Nevada,
Arizona, Montana, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.

These
big-box states are, in many ways, worse off than other out-of-it
places like Oklahoma, Arkansas and West Virginia: Half of the
Western states are federal land administered by agencies based in
the East.

It is usually said that the interior West is a
colony of the federal government. Unfortunately, our former
colonial master has lost interest in the West, and is now chasing
new colonies in Iraq, the "Stans" and the Ukraine. That we are a
cast-off colony — a first-wives’ region — means
the feds no longer subsidize our dams or the logging of our
matchstick-sized trees, or the building of nuclear weapons here.

Therefore, we should be in an economic depression.
Instead, even in a five-year drought, this once-rural region is
booming. I think that’s because we have glorious national
parks such as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and Glacier. Visitors
get a taste for these landscapes and then find that they can own
their own little national park, or at least a national monument. So
it is our fate that millions of Americans are moving here, bringing
equity and pensions to this aspiring backwater.

As a
result, the pretty West is making do. But will this transfer of
wealth halt when the last "unspoiled" valley is spoiled?

Of course, lots of places don’t even have this much of a
future. But sometimes, no-account regions rise up. According to
Joseph Ellis’s "His Excellency," a biography of George
Washington, the American revolution really started when Washington
realized he was keeping himself in poverty by aping the British
nobility’s pricey way of life.

Washington urged his
countrymen to produce their own goods to free themselves from
English imports. In the end, of course, the scorned, culture-less
colonies triumphed and came to dominate the English-speaking world.
They succeeded because the colonists had, in addition to several
million square-miles of land at their backs, aggression, pride and
a genius for politics. Might the land-rich and culture-poor
interior West also be the seed of change that ripens within the
current American empire?

There are signs. This spring,
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson organized an international meeting
on energy for western Canada, western Mexico and the western United
states. Richardson wants to weld the western portion of North
America using our common stores of energy — both the fossil
kind and the renewable kind — to bring us together.

I don’t know if the governor was asked by John Kerry to be
his running mate. But if Richardson was asked and turned Kerry
down, it might be because he thinks putting together the western
chunks of three nations is more important than becoming vice
president of a declining imperial government.

This is not
about revolution, of course. It is about the filling of a vacuum
created by the federal government’s decision to ignore a
large chunk of the nation in order to go off on foreign adventures.
Patriotism will carry those adventures for awhile. Yet in the end,
the United States is a very practical, bottom-line nation.

The correction to this adventuring should have come from
the Blue States, but despite the presence in their midst of
Harvard, The New York Times

and herds of
intellectuals, they have proven more tone-deaf to America than the
present administration.

So it is up to the West, whether
led by Richardson, California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
or Nevada Democrat Sen. Harry Reid, to figure out what’s more
important to America — nation-building far from home or
building energy independence.

Ed Marston is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org) where he lives
and writes.

]]>No publisherPoliticsWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleNow that we’ve clear-cut the Forest
Service…http://www.hcn.org/wotr/15152
The writer once suggested that the U.S. Forest Service
clear-cut itself; to his surprise, it did I first met the U.S. Forest
Service in 1967, when I helped build a log cabin at 9,600 feet on
the Gunnison National Forest in western Colorado. The idea that I
was part owner of 300,000 square miles of beautiful land
intoxicated me. We became so drunk on the land that in 1974, we
moved from New York to a town 30 miles from the cabin. We would
have lived in the forest, except that the West had winters then,
and the cabin was unreachable for much of the year.

To
build the cabin, I first had to deal with District Ranger L.C.
Case. I sent in plans; the agency engineer modified them so the
snow-load wouldn’t crush it; and we had our permit. It was
that fast.

Case ran his district the old way: from
horseback, with the help of a slim, leather-bound book of rules in
his shirt pocket. By the time we moved West in 1974, things had
changed. From its 1905 founding into the 1950s, the agency had been
protective of land that had been cut over and overgrazed in the
19th century.

But in the nation’s post-World War II
exuberance, Congress prodded the Forest Service to ramp up the cut,
from a few billion board-feet per year to 10 to 12 billion
board-feet. Like a vampire in the full moon, the Forest Service
turned into a timber beast and ravaged the land. It stopped only
when lawsuits in the Pacific Northwest drove a wooden stake through
the beast’s heart.

As a regional journalist, I
wrote a lot about the agency during the 1980s and 1990s. At one
point I called on the nation to "clear-cut the Forest Service."
That was then. Now, I am one of five delegates chosen by the
agency’s Region II to represent it at the 100th anniversary
celebration of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C., this
January.

The agency has diminished since the days when
L.C. Case and hundreds like him ruled their domains through their
personal authority. Rangers still rode horses in the 1970s, but the
riders were getting fat. Staff had been pushed indoors to manage
paperwork caused by the new environmental laws.

They also
found themselves mandated to work with the public. That was a joke.

Even the best of them couldn’t forget that until
recently they had been lords and masters of the forest. At one
meeting in our small town, the staffer kept referring to the
audience as "people of the public persuasion." He thought we were a
cult.

At another public meeting, also in 1982, the forest
supervisor, sitting in the audience, decided the talk had gone on
long enough. He made a throat-slitting gesture and his subordinate
ended the meeting in mid-sentence.

The transition from
protector of the forests to destroyer of the forests that took
place after World War II had at least left the agency in charge.
But for much of the 1990s, the forests were managed by the courts
or by the White House. And public disdain translated into a
shrinking budget and vanishing prestige.

Now, I think,
the agency’s situation is changing again. This November, I
attended a regional rehearsal for the coming centennial
get-together. People interested in the national forests and
grasslands of Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska gathered in Fort
Collins, Colo., to review the agency’s first 100 years and to
look ahead.

I expected a grim gathering. The agency is at
a low point in budget, personnel and authority. Staff is
overworked. Roads are deteriorating. Hikers and our dogs, off-road
vehicles and weeds run roughshod over the land. Nevertheless, the
meeting was upbeat. Why are you feeling good? I asked several
people.

"Things are looking up," was the best they could
do. But I think I know one reason.

After the obligatory
references to the agency’s godlike founder, Gifford Pinchot,
discussion among the 200 or so attendees moved to a future that
involved cooperating with citizens, groups and other agencies both
within the national forests and across boundaries. This kind of
talk has been a staple for years at Forest Service meetings. But at
this meeting, it seemed real.

The agency’s leaders
and staff have come to realize they can’t manage the land
without help. Most important, they’ve gone from resenting
that truth to welcoming it.

It’s happened because
the agency has been clear-cut. Retirements, budget cuts, pressure
from lawsuits and more bad press than Saddam Hussein got has
resulted in a new Forest Service. Now it is up to us —
"people of the public persuasion" — to work with and on
behalf of the agency to restore, protect and even do some careful
exploitation of the national forests.

Ed
Marston is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Paonia,
Colorado.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleColorado voters snub coal for all things
renewablehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/287/15140
The board member of a small electric utility opines that
the wind power mandate of Colorado's Amendment 37 is good for the
energy industry, despite the utilities' resistance Yeah, a visionary.
Wind or natural gas or hog manure was all the same to Enron:
vehicles of enrichment. But Enron’s biggest crime
wasn’t financial trickery. It was its betrayal of the
nation’s stab at electric deregulation. Until Enron and the
little Enrons turned deregulation into a scandal, it had the
potential to break apart monopolistic utilities and open the way to
innovation, as happened in the telephone industry. Once Enron and
the gang of energy traders almost bankrupted California, the
restructuring of a stodgy industry came to a halt.

To
understand what electric utilities are, and why they must be shaken
up, imagine that Thomas Edison — dead since 1931— comes
to life and tours a "modern" coal-fired power plant. It would all
be familiar to him except the computerized control room. The plant
would be bigger and hotter and operate at a higher voltage, but the
underlying technology would be the same.

The technology
is antiquated, and it doesn’t always work: A recent report by
the industry’s research arm, the Electric Power Research
Institute, says that for every $100 Americans pay to a utility,
they spend another $50 on losses from outages, brownouts, voltage
fluctuations and the like.

As if the industry
didn’t have enough problems, this fall along came
Colorado’s ballot Initiative 37, which, now that it has
passed 53 percent to 47 percent, requires utilities to begin
selling electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar,
flowing water, the burning of used french-fry oil. My local
electric utility, on whose board of directors I sit, voted to back
the initiative.

That made Delta-Montrose Electric
Association part of a tiny minority. On the other side were
Colorado’s major utilities, spending millions of customer
dollars. For giants like Xcel, it was about family values: They are
happily married to coal, and another partner in the bedroom is
anathema. They have a point. Winds start and stop without a
moment’s notice, while coal-fired power plants work best
flat-out. Ask a coal plant to quickly change speed to make up for a
drop in wind generation elsewhere on the system, and you will see a
spectacular pile-up.

But rather than figure out how to
add renewables to their mix, and rather than think, "Maybe we
should begin phasing out of coal and move into wind and
efficiency," Colorado’s utilities spent their
customers’ money begging voters to let them remain in the
early 20th century.

The utilities are not the only ones
wind power will trouble. It will give lots of us fits. I live
within a few miles of three mines that produce 1 percent of
America’s coal. But if not for train whistles and crossing
gates, I wouldn’t know I live in a coal valley. Underground
mines don’t leave much of a mark on the landscape.

By comparison, wind turbines take up lots of land and are visible
from far off. Ask the people on Cape Cod who object to a wind farm
proposed for the water off their shores.

Why then did I
— half utility beast and half environmental beast —
back renewable energy on Election Day? First, because integrating
wind into the electricity mix will force utility executives and
engineers to innovate, or to make way for those who can. With
deregulation dead, wind is the only modernizing tool for a
horse-and-buggy industry.

Second: Wind is not a utopian
idea. Wind is pragmatic, central-station power, like coal. Its
problems can be solved.

Third: After seeing photos of
melting polar ice caps in National Geographic, I believe in global
climate change. We must cut our use of fossil fuels.

There is also beauty. I visited a large wind ranch on the arid,
windy plains of New Mexico recently, where 136 turbines snake for
miles along the edge of a low cliff. Except for a recurring whoosh,
the machines were silent. What I most remember are the shadows of
the immense blades sweeping across the ground toward me.

The wind machines added to the beauty of that land, as windmills
add beauty to Holland’s coast. I could live among them, as I
now live among coal trains. All I ask is that some of the
electricity the turbines create out of thin air comes to me.

Ed Marston writes in Paonia,
Colorado.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryRenewable EnergyEssaysArticleColorado snubs coal for all things renewablehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/15126
The writer cheers Colorado voters who pushed renewable
energy onto the stodgy producers of electricity Not long after Enron, one of
our larger humpty-dumpties, had its great fall, I heard a supporter
say he missed its CEO, because "Ken Lay was a visionary. He wanted
to cover parts of Texas with wind turbines and export that clean
energy to the rest of the country."

Yeah, a visionary.
Wind or natural gas or hog manure was all the same to Enron:
vehicles of enrichment. But Enron’s biggest crime
wasn’t financial trickery. It was its betrayal of the
nation’s stab at electric deregulation. Until Enron and the
little Enrons turned deregulation into a scandal, it had the
potential to break apart monopolistic utilities and open the way to
innovation, as happened in the telephone industry. Once Enron and
the gang of energy traders almost bankrupted California, the
restructuring of a stodgy industry came to a halt.

To
understand what electric utilities are, and why they must be shaken
up, imagine that Thomas Edison — dead since 1931— comes
to life and tours a "modern" coal-fired power plant. It would all
be familiar to him except the computerized control room. The plant
would be bigger and hotter and operate at a higher voltage, but the
underlying technology would be the same.

Worse, a recent
report by the industry’s research arm, the Electric Power
Research Institute, says that for every $100 Americans pay to a
utility, they spend another $50 on losses from outages, brown-outs,
voltage fluctuations and the like.

As if the industry
didn’t have enough problems, this fall in Colorado along came
ballot Initiative-37, which, now that it has passed 53 percent-47
percent, requires utilities to begin selling electricity from
renewable sources such as wind, solar, flowing water, the burning
of used french-fry oil. My local electric utility, on whose board
of directors I sit, voted to back the initiative.

That
made Delta-Montrose Electric Association part of a tiny minority.
On the other side were Colorado’s major utilities, spending
millions of customer dollars. For giants like Xcel, it was about
family values: They are happily married to coal, and another
partner in the bedroom is anathema.

They have a point.
Winds start and stop without a moment’s notice while
coal-fired power plants work best flat-out. Ask a coal plant to
quickly change speed to make up for a drop in wind generation
elsewhere on the system, and you will see a spectacular pile-up.

But rather than figure out how to add renewables to their
mix, and rather than think, "Maybe we should begin phasing out of
coal and move into wind and efficiency," Colorado’s utilities
spent their customers’ money begging voters to let them
remain in the early 20th century.

The utilities are not
the only ones wind power will trouble. It will give lots of us
fits. I live within a few miles of three mines that produce 1
percent of America’s coal. But if not for train whistles and
crossing gates, I wouldn’t know I live in a coal valley.
Underground mines occupy few acres above ground.

By
comparison, wind turbines take up lots of land and are visible from
far off. Ask the people on Cape Cod who object to possible turbines
off their shores. Ask bird-watchers, who fear that whirling
propellers will knock hundreds of thousands of birds out of the
sky.

Why then did I — half utility beast and half
environmental beast — back renewable energy on election day?
First, because integrating wind into the electricity mix will force
utility executives and engineers to innovate, or to make way for
those who can. With deregulation dead, wind is the only modernizing
tool for a horse-and-buggy industry.

Second: Wind is not
a utopian idea. Wind is pragmatic, central-station power, like
coal. Its problems can be solved.

Third: After seeing
photos of melting polar ice caps in National
Geographic, I believe in global climate change. We must
cut our use of fossil fuels.

There is also beauty. I
visited a large wind ranch on the arid, windy plains of New Mexico
recently, where 136 turbines snake for miles along the edge of a
low cliff. Except for a recurring whoosh, the machines were silent.
What I most remember are the shadows of the immense blades sweeping
across the ground toward me. I stood in the near silence and in
those racing shadows until our tour bus left.

The wind
machines added to the beauty of that land, as windmills add beauty
to Holland’s coast. I could live among them, as I now live
among coal trains. All I ask is that some of the electricity the
turbines create out of thin air comes to me.

Ed
Marston is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He writes in
Paonia, Colorado.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryRenewable EnergyWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleThank you, Sierra Clubhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/14671
The writer thanks the Sierra Club for engaging us in a
conversation about immigration and how many Americans are too
many The Sierra
Club was transformed because Brower led it to act. The club first
saved Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and Colorado from a huge
dam at Echo Park, and then the Grand Canyon in Arizona from being
flooded by two dams. The club's success enraged the federal
government and the water buffaloes, and it lost the club both its
clubby nature and its federal tax deduction.

To this day,
you can’t deduct a gift to the Sierra Club from your federal
taxes. Because it is not under the thumb of the Internal Revenue
Service, the Sierra Club is one of the few environmental groups
that can endorse political candidates and back or oppose proposed
laws.

Now, once again, the Sierra Club is being shaken
into life. This time, the shaker isn’t a green giant like
David Brower, but a peculiar mix of "outsiders" — the Sierra
Club is still a club in many ways — concerned about an issue
the club’s mainstream desperately wants to avoid: illegal
immigration into the United States.

But the club’s
democratic form has thrust it into the discussion. All members get
to vote by mail ballot on elections to its 15-person governing
board, and you can join for $15 to $25 (the club has periodic
sales, and often throws in daypacks with a new membership). The
rebels, mainly newcomers to the club, claim to have elected five
members to the board in past elections, and need only three more
for a majority. At that point, the centrists say, the Club’s
$81 million budget will be in the hands of racists, vegetarians and
animal-rights extremists.

It is too late to join the club
for this election, but if you’re already one of the
club’s members, you have until April 21 to vote. (A small
percentage of Sierra Club members vote in these elections.)

Your mail ballot gives you the right to vote for five
candidates. The Club itself, through a nominating committee, has
put up eight establishment candidates, and nine candidates have
gotten on by petition. The best-known petition candidate is former
three-term Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, aka Gov. Gloom, for his
midnight-in-America views on population, sprawl and the bankrupting
expense of medical care. Unfortunately, Lamm seems farseeing today
rather than dyspeptic, as he did 30 years ago, when he began
expressing these ideas.

Issues, of course, are never
allowed to be about themselves: They are always spun into something
else. To the mainstream leaders of the Sierra Club, the immigration
debate is about racism. Swedes and Germans aren’t sneaking
into the United States; dark-skinned people are. So those who
oppose immigration really oppose the browning of America.

Some of those who oppose illegal immigration are racists. Others
are people who think our 3.5 million square-mile nation has enough
people, enough pollution, enough general activity. Without illegal
immigration, the nation’s population would be close to
stabilizing, instead of zooming upward.

Others oppose
illegal immigration because they are opposed to a world without
borders; a globalized world in which capital and jobs and people
flow from "nation" to "nation" without restraint. I put nation in
quotes because if a geographic area does not have borders that
control people and capital and jobs, it is not a nation, it is a
place.

We are well down this road. President George Bush
may have embroiled himself in Iraq because he can’t govern
the United States. He can cut taxes, but he can’t direct jobs
to us or help us keep the jobs we have; he can’t force or
convince individuals or corporations to invest in the United States
rather than in China or Mexico; and while he can keep U.S.
residents from visiting Cuba, he can’t keep Cubans or anyone
else sufficiently determined from moving here.

This
porosity and slow-motion anarchy may be an excellent thing. Perhaps
we should welcome the ongoing collapse of nation states, and the
transformation of the U.S. government into an entity no longer
helpful or even loyal to its citizens. But it is the nature of our
democracy and traditions that before we complete the dissolution of
the United States, we discuss and then vote on it. Thankfully, we
still have institutions and media to allow us to do this.

The current Sierra Club election may not be the ideal vehicle for
holding this discussion and election, but it is a pretty good one.
Thank you, Sierra Club, for being helpful in our hour of national
need.

Ed Marston is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org) where he is a writer and downtown
developer.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleSome trees inspire true lovehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/14263
Ed Marston tells a love story about one of the
West’s embattled trees Biologist
Diana Tomback got to know the trees as a young graduate student,
and over the decades her relationship with them deepened. Until
recently, she expressed that relationship in scientific
publications, where every statement is backed by a reference to
another paper.

In dry language, her papers say that the
trees she has lived with for 30 years are going extinct. They will
outlast her, but maybe not her son. Because the tree is a keystone
species, it will probably take with it the Yellowstone grizzly,
which depends on the tree’s nuts to fatten itself for winter.
It will also diminish a bird, the Clark’s nutcracker, which
depends on the tree for food, and returns the favor by dispersing
the nuts.

It had been a very successful partnership,
Tomback says, enabling both species to spread across the Northern
Rockies and other high mountain ranges where they live.

Whitebark pine depends mostly on fires and blowdowns to create
openings for its seeds. In the past, fires would start at low
elevations and burn their way up the sides of mountains, creating
space for whitebark pine seedlings. But for almost a century now,
fires have been suppressed; as whitebark pines die of old age,
less-useful trees take their place.

The species’
doom has been sealed by blister rust, an Asian import that came to
the Pacific Northwest and western Canada in 1910. It quickly
destroyed the logging economy based on western white pine and sugar
pine, and now, it is destroying whitebark pine and related species.
The disease has been moving south and east into drier places: It
may soon infect the Great Basin’s bristlecone pines, the
oldest trees in the world.

Given our inability to allow
wildfire, and given the ingenuity of blister rust, there seems
little chance of saving the trees. But an informal network of
scientists has formed to do just that. Working with little funding,
they first focused on gaps in what they knew about the tree and the
disease that girdled the trees, killing them.

Recently,
they turned activist, forming the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem
Foundation, with Tomback as unpaid director. She squeezes the work
in among her teaching and research at the University of Colorado,
Denver.

The foundation’s aim is to restore forests,
which means setting fires or letting them burn, so that pine nuts
spread by Clark’s nutcracker can again find the sunny spots
they need to sprout. The researchers and their graduate students
are also walking the forest. Here and there in a stand of whitebark
pines ravaged by blister rust, they will find one or two healthy
trees. The foundation promotes the idea of collecting seeds to
restart the population.

Clearly, there is a lot of blame
to go around for the whitebark’s predicament. But Tombeck
refuses to play the blame game. Perhaps she sees herself as being
on weak intellectual ground, for there is nothing in her discipline
that says it is bad for blister rust to clear whitebark pine and
its dependent species from the landscape.

So she falls
back on federal law as a last resort. The Endangered Species Act,
she says, requires that the government keep species from going
extinct. But I don’t think the law is what drives her and her
fellow scientists either. In the midst of showing charts and
studies during lunch, she tells a story.

"I was with a
colleague at a conference. We were talking about the trends. We
were talking science, until I saw he was crying. He was crying
because these trees and the mountain world they created are
disappearing."

Left alone, the onrushing world that fire
exclusion and blister rust is creating may be better in some ways
than the one we live in. It will be simpler and more homogeneous,
she says. But Diana Tomback and her colleagues are in love with the
profile the whitebark pine trees make as you climb the side of a
mountain toward the top. They’re in love with the
relationships they know exist between that tree and the birds and
squirrels and grizzly bears.

Like the rest of us, they are
in love with nature as they originally found it. That has forced
them out of disinterested observation into the profane world of
values and competing interests, as they speak up for forests that
cannot defend themselves against foreign invaders and our
neglect.

Ed Marston is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He is the paper’s senior
writer.

]]>No publisherWildlifeWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleThe EPA needs an urban pit bullhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/257/14209
Putting Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt in charge of the
Environmental Protection Agency is like using a goldfish to guard a
junkyard Leavitt is not
anti-environment. He worked with Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon to
create a pro-environment program in the Western Governors’
Association. And he got beat up badly by the locals in southern
Utah when he tried to protect the spectacular San Rafael Swell;
Emery County residents feared they would no longer be able to ride
their motorized quadracycles over that wonderful federal
landscape.

His darkest environmental stain is the Legacy
Highway. If it’s built, a massive chunk of concrete will
smash through the wetlands along the east side of the Great Salt
Lake. A slightly lighter stain is the deal he just cut with the
Bush administration to open millions of acres of potential
wilderness land to oil and gas development.

But overall,
Leavitt is greener than Utah. How much greener it is impossible to
say, since he got his chain yanked by his fellow Utahns whenever he
moved to protect the environment.

The real question is why
the president nominated a Westerner to run the EPA, when the West
doesn’t have an environment, in the EPA sense of the word. We
have Yellowstone and rivers and immense expanses of national forest
and desert that are every American’s birthright.

But
the EPA isn’t mainly concerned with wide-open-spaces where
deer and antelope still try to roam. The agency doesn’t
enforce the Endangered Species Act, which protects grizzlies and
wolves and black-footed ferrets.

The EPA is primarily
about brown clouds over cities and rivers that catch fire and how
much soot power plants can belch. The EPA is about making it
possible for tens of millions of people to live cheek-by-jowl with
industry and constantly congested highways and sewage treatment
plants that dump effluent into rivers that then provide drinking
water for the cities downstream.

Westerners can be head of
the Department of Interior, which runs the publicly owned West. We
also gravitate to the Department of Defense, as Wyomingite Dick
Cheney did. We certainly can’t be secretary of the Treasury
because we’re a welfare region. A Westerner at Treasury would
panic Wall Street and Main Street.

Nor should a Westerner
head the Environmental Protection Agency. The reason has to do with
geography and demography. Christine Todd Whitman, who finally quit
as EPA chief in disgust a few months ago, fit the traditional mold.
This moderate Republican had been governor of New Jersey’s
7,400 square miles and 8.1 million people, or 1,100 people per
square mile.

Utah, a big, boxy state, is 12 times bigger
than New Jersey, at 82,000 square miles. Utah has lots of
Western-type environment. But it has only 2,100,000 residents, or
26 people per square mile. Each Utahn has 40 times more elbow room
than each New Jerseyan.

Whitman knew instinctively about
people being afflicted by noise and air pollution and filthy rivers
and Superfund sites in aging cities. But how can a Utah native
understand or sympathize with the EPA and its core mission? We,
thankfully, only have samples of those problems. The Wasatch Front
or Colorado Front Range looms large to a Utahn or Coloradoan. But
it’s just a taste of sprawl compared to a really dense
metropolitan area.

So why nominate Leavitt? President Bush
must be so confident of his 2004 re-election that he doesn’t
think he needs an appropriate EPA head. Why make your Cabinet
meetings contentious by having someone argue for cleaner power
plants when you can have a Westerner whose every instinct will be
to increase the mining and burning of fossil fuels?

In
nominating Leavitt, Bush is inviting a bring-’em-on fight of
the kind he relishes. Democrats and environmentalists will attack
Leavitt as anti-environment. The Republicans will defend him as a
moderate and a nice guy.

Both arguments are irrelevant.
What counts is that Leavitt will come to this important job without
a deep understanding of the 200 million or so coastal and
Midwestern Americans who are the EPA’s core constituents.
Understanding their needs won’t be bred in his bones, as it
was with Whitman, or would be with an Easterner such as New York
Gov. George Pataki.

When it comes to EPA’s core
constituencies and major issues, Leavitt has no record, no
experience, no relevant background. This fight is about inviting a
goldfish to guard a wrecking yard. This fight is about the
structure and purpose of a Cabinet-level office. And it suggests
that if Bush succeeds with this inappropriate nomination, he will
romp to victory in 2004.

Ed Marston
(emarston@hcn.org) is High Country News’ senior
journalist.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeEssaysArticleThe EPA needs an urban pit bullhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/14218
Ed Marston believes Utah"s Gov. Leavitt is an
inappropriate choice to head the EPA. That"s the
image called up by Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt’s nomination as
head of the Environmental Protection Administration. It"s a
nomination that makes no sense.

Leavitt is not
anti-environment. He worked with Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon to
create a pro-environment program in the Western Governors"
Association. And he got beat up badly by the locals in southern
Utah when he tried to protect the spectacular San Rafael Swell.
Emery County residents feared they would no longer be able to ride
their motorized quadracycles over that wonderful federal
landscape.

His darkest environmental stain is the Legacy
Highway. If built, a massive chunk of concrete will smash through
the wetlands along the east side of the Great Salt Lake. A slightly
lighter stain is the deal he just cut with the Bush administration
to open millions of acres of potential wilderness land to oil and
gas development.

But overall, Leavitt is greener than
Utah. How much greener it is impossible to say, since he got his
chain yanked by his fellow Utahns whenever he moved to protect the
environment.

The real question is why the president
nominated a Westerner to run the EPA when the West doesn’t
have an environment, in the EPA sense of the word. We have
Yellowstone and rivers and immense expanses of national forest and
desert that are every American"s birthright.

But EPA isn"t
concerned with wide-open-spaces where deer and antelope still try
to roam. The agency doesn’t enforce the Endangered Species
Act, which protects grizzlies and wolves and black-footed ferrets.

The EPA is about brown clouds over cities and rivers that
catch fire and how much soot power plants can belch. The EPA is
about making it possible for tens of millions of people to live
cheek-by-jowl with industry and constantly congested highways and
sewage treatment plants that dump effluent into rivers that then
provide drinking water for the cities downstream.

Westerners can be head of the Department of Interior, which runs
the publicly owned West. We also gravitate to the Department of
Defense, as Wyomingite Dick Cheney did. We certainly can’t be
Secretary of the Treasury because we"re a welfare region. A
Westerner at Treasury would panic Wall Street and Main
Street.

Nor should a Westerner head the Environmental
Protection Agency. The reason has to do with geography and
demography. Christine Todd Whitman, who finally quit as EPA chief
in disgust a few months ago, fit the traditional mold. This
moderate Republican had been governor of New Jersey’s 7,400
square miles and 8.1 million people, or 1,100 people per square
mile.

Utah, a big-box state, is 12 times bigger than New
Jersey, at 82,000 square miles. Utah has lots of Western-type
environment. But it has only 2,100,000 residents, or 26 people per
square mile. Each Utahn has 40 times more elbow room than each New
Jerseyan.

Whitman knew instinctively about people being
afflicted by noise and air pollution and filthy rivers and
Superfund sites in aging cities. But how can a Utah native
understand or sympathize with the EPA and its core
mission?

We, thankfully, only have samples of those
problems. The Wasatch Front or Colorado Front Range looms large to
a Utahn or Colorado. But it"s just a taste of sprawl compared to a
really dense metropolitan area.

So why nominate Leavitt?
President Bush must be so confident of his 2004 re-election that he
doesn’t think he needs an appropriate EPA head. Why make your
cabinet meetings contentious by having someone argue for cleaner
power plants when you can have a Westerner whose every instinct
will be to increase the mining and burning of fossil fuels?

In nominating Leavitt, Bush is inviting a
bring-‘em-on fight of the kind he relishes. Democrats and
environmentalists will attack Leavitt as anti-environment. The
Republicans will defend him as a moderate and a nice guy.

Both arguments are irrelevant. What’s counts is that Leavitt
will come to this important job without a deep understanding of the
200 million or so coastal and Midwestern Americans who are the
EPA’s core constituents. Understanding their needs
won’t be bred in his bones, as it was with Whitman, or would
be with New York Gov. George Pataki.

When it comes to what
matters to the EPA, Leavitt has no record, no experience, no
relevant background. This fight is about inviting a goldfish to
guard a wrecking yard. This fight is about the structure and
purpose of a cabinet-level office. And it suggests that if Bush
succeeds with this nomination, he will romp to victory in
2004.

Ed Marston is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(emarston@hcn.org). He is the paper’s senior
journalist.